A Ghost and a Prince Meet Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Band Wagon

Directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, "The Band Wagon", released in 1953, was the last of the great MGM musicals. Telling the story of a former star looking to revive his career, it shares its name with a 1930s Broadway show which starred Fred and Adele Astaire and includes songs from that show, including "Dancing in the Dark". Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz composed "That's Entertainment" for the film, where it is sung by Jack Buchanan, Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant.

The song later became associated with Judy Garland and gave its name to a 1974 compilation film released to celebrate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 50th anniversary.

Answer: Simba

Simba is the prince, Mufasa is his murdered father, Scar his uncle the usurper, and Pumbaa a warthog he meets along the way. As in the original, the father's ghost appears to his son, but there the similarity ends. Simba claims his rightful throne and, although Scar meets a grisly end, there is otherwise a happy ending.

Answer: Star Trek

'The play's the thing wherein I'll trap the conscience of the king' says Hamlet. In this early Star Trek episode Captain Kirk is asked to determine whether the leader of a Shakespearean theatre company is a mass murderer who evaded justice. It features a performance of "Hamlet".

Hamlet's fourth soliloquy ('To be or not to be') refers to death as 'the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns'. The 1991 movie "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" stars Christopher Plummer as a Klingon general who extensively quotes from the play. David Warner, himself a distinguished stage Hamlet, plays Gorkon, Chancellor of the Klingon High Council, who says 'You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon'. This inspired "The Tragedy of Khamlet, Son of the Emperor of Qo'noS", a translation into Klingon carried out over several years by Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader.

Answer: John Everett Millais

Painted by Millais in 1851 to 1852, the painting shows Ophelia singing in the river before she drowns. Ophelia was modelled by Elizabeth Siddal, pre-Raphaelite muse, artist and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's future wife, lying in a bathtub, as a result of which she caught a severe chill, possibly pneumonia.

Answer: Thursday Next

In an alternate universe, where England is a republic whose prime minister, Yorick Kaine, has been stirring up hatred against Denmark, Thursday Next is a Literary Detective, able to travel into books. During Hamlet's visit to the Outland, the play is left to fend for itself. Combining with "The Merry Wives of Windsor" results in a play called "The Merry Wives of Elsinore", which 'takes a long time to become funny and, when it finally does, everyone dies'.

Answer: Carole Lombard

Jack Benny and Carole Lombard play Joseph and Maria Tura, a married couple running a theatrical company in Warsaw, which is performing in "Hamlet" when the Nazis invade. The actors use their skills to frustrate Gestapo attempts to crush the Polish resistance. Hamlet's line 'To be or not to be' is the cue for an admirer to visit Maria in her dressing room.

A month before the film's release Carole Lombard died in a plane crash when returning from a tour selling War Bonds.

Answer: Ian McEwan

In the play Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 'O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams'. The narrator of Ian McEwan's novel is an unborn child confined within its mother Trudy's womb, where it overhears her and Uncle Claude plotting to poison its father. The child's dilemma is not whether or not to die, but whether or not to be born.

Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize with his 1998 novel "Amsterdam". His most famous novel is probably "Atonement" (2001).

Answer: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bring the players to Elsinore, spy on their old university friend, are sent to accompany Hamlet to his death in England and are blown up by their own bomb, their deaths being announced in the last scene of the play. Tom Stoppard's absurdist comedy "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" shows the perplexed courtiers observing the events of the play they are part of whilst unable to escape their fate.

Here Hamlet is a minor character, most of whose actions occur offstage.

Answer: Hair

"Hair: The Tribal Love Rock Musical" opened on Broadway in 1968. Notable for its multi-racial cast and notorious for its nudity, profanity and portrayal of drug use, it tells the story of a tribe of long-haired, latter-day bohemians fighting conscription into the Vietnam War. Hamlet's words on the nobility of man are sung over dead bodies following a hallucinogenic trip.

Answer: The Northman

The legend of Amleth appears in the Gesta Danorum, the first full history of Denmark, which was written by Saxo Grammaticus in the 13th century. As with Hamlet, Amleth's father is slain by his uncle, who marries his widow. Amleth also feigns madness, kills an eavesdropping royal adviser, is sent to England to be killed, but changes the message so that his attendants are killed instead. Amleth does wreak revenge, but 'everyone ends in mincemeat'.

In "The Northman", directed by Robert Eggers, Amleth, sworn to avenge his father's death, has become a berserker after escaping his murderous uncle's assassins. Discovering that his uncle Fjolnir has lost his kingdom and fled to Iceland, Amleth follows him there. His mother Gudrun reveals that she planned his uncle's coup, wanting both Amleth and his father dead. Having killed his mother in self-defence, Amleth fights his uncle at the crater of the volcano Hekla. Both die and Amleth is carried off to Valhalla.